Monday, July 29, 2013

Hamas-linked CAIR calls on Obama to condemn attacks on Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

The Investigative Project
reported in 2007 that the FBI had identified CAIR as part of the Muslim
Brotherhood's Palestine Committee:

Dallas--In testimony Tuesday, FBI Agent Lara Burns
reported before the jury in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that
the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was listed as a member
of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee, right alongside HLF,
the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the United Association
for Studies and Research (UASR). Agent Burns further testified that CAIR
received money from HLF - a claim that Nihad Awad blatantly denied in a congressional testimony in September of 2003.

Burns also said that both Omar Ahmed and Nihad Awad, CAIR co-founders who
today serve as CAIR's chairman emeritus and executive director,
respectively, were also listed as individual members the Brotherhood's
Palestine Committee in America.

So in this, they're just sticking up for the home office. "CAIR calls
on Obama to condemn attacks against Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," by
Patrick Howley for the Daily Caller, July 27:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s
largest and most powerful Muslim advocacy group, called Saturday for the
Obama administration to condemn military attacks against the Freedom
and Justice Party, the controversial religious party removed from power
in a recent coup that the Obama administration is insisting “was not a
coup.”

The administration reportedly fears that declaring a coup d’etat in
Egypt would force the U.S. to suspend all of its assistance programs in
the country, which also help block weapons smuggling to Hamas terrorists
in the Gaza Strip.

Despite the Obama administration’s inaction, Egyptian military forces
have instituted a shoot-to-kill policy to suppress protesters urging
the return of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi to power. Morsi,
who fled Cairo during the military non-coup earlier this month, has been
defiant in exile — and Egypt hangs in the balance. 65 or 66 pro-Morsi
protesters were killed Saturday by military forces near a sit-in at a
Cairo mosque.

While the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge that a coup has
taken place, the Council on American Islamic-Relations (CAIR) is
outright supporting the Muslim Brotherhood protesters.

“The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s
largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization, today called
on the Obama administration to forcefully condemn the killing of dozens
of pro-democracy demonstrators by Egyptian security forces,” according
to a statement released by the group Saturday.

“We join with those in Egypt and in the international community who
are condemning the violence, including Sheikh of Al-Azhar Ahmed
al-Tayyeb, who said he ‘deplores and condemns the deaths of a number of
martyrs who were victims of today’s events,’” CAIR stated.

“Condemnations came from across the political spectrum, including
from Mohamed ElBaradei, who strongly condemned the ‘excessive use of
force.’ British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: ‘I call on the
Egyptian authorities to respect the right of peaceful protest, to cease
the use of violence against protesters, including live fire, and to hold
to account those responsible,’” CAIR stated.

“Without a clear condemnation of the killings, we send the message
that even more repressive measures may be taken against the
demonstrators. The clearest indicator of our nation’s revulsion at the
killings would be to suspend all American military aid until the
violence stops and democratic freedoms are restored,” CAIR stated.

The landmark health-reform law passed in 2010 has never been very popular and always highly partisan, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds
that a group of once loyal Democrats has been steadily turning against
Obamacare: Democrats who are ideologically moderate or conservative.

Just after the law was passed in 2010, fully 74 percent of moderate
and conservative Democrats supported the federal law making changes to
the health-care system. But just 46 percent express support in the new
poll, down 11 points in the past year. Liberal Democrats, by contrast,
have continued to support the law at very high levels – 78 percent in
the latest survey. Among the public at large, 42 percent support and 49
percent oppose the law, retreating from an even split at 47 percent
apiece last July.

The shift among the Democratic party’s large swath in the ideological
middle– most Democrats in this poll, 57 percent, identify as moderate
or conservative – is driving an overall drop in party support for the
legislation: Just 58 percent of Democrats now support the law, down from
68 percent last year and the lowest since the law was enacted in 2010.
This broader drop mirrors tracking surveys by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation and Fox News polls, both of which found Democratic support falling earlier this year.

Of [the] 51 percent [who oppose the law], somewhere between a quarter
and a third oppose the bill not because they are against it, but
because they don’t think it went far enough.

They can’t use that excuse here. If Democratic support for Obamacare
fell because more Democrats suddenly wish the law went farther, that
drop would occur first and primarily among left-wing Democrats, not
moderates and conservatives. It’s hard to come up with a story that
explains why that dynamic would cause a drop in support only among moderates and conservatives.

Total Compensation: U.S. Government Employees vs the Private Sector

How does the total compensation of the average U.S. federal
government employee compare to that of the average U.S. individual
income earner who works full-time, year-round?

To find out, we've
taken the average cash incomes earned by each and added the average
benefits that each receives through their employer as reported by the
Congressional Budget Office in 2012. They found that:

On
average for workers at all education levels, benefits for federal
employees cost about $20 per hour worked, whereas benefits for
private-sector employees cost $14, CBO estimates. Thus, benefits for
federal workers cost 48 percent more per hour worked, on average, than
benefits for private sector workers with similar attributes. Benefits
also constituted a larger share of compensation for federal workers,
accounting for 39 percent of the cost of total compensation, compared
with 30 percent in the private sector.

We next
visualized those numbers, in which we reveal the average total
compensation of U.S. federal government employees and individual
Americans who work in full time jobs all year long:

We
find that while the average U.S. federal government employee makes
$14,632 more in direct cash income than their private sector
counterpart, at $74,436 versus $59,804, the extremely generous benefits
with which they are also compensated boosts their real income margin by
$26,632 over the average private sector income earner, putting their
total compensation at $114,436 versus $87,804.

Keeping in mind that the average income of Americans in the private sector is considerably elevated by some very highly paid individuals
such as CEOs, very specialized medical professionals, sports stars and
entertainment moguls, the total compensation of U.S. federal government
employees puts them all in a league of their own. And that's not even
including their extreme job security.

The IRS: Exempt from Obamacare While Making the Rest of Us Comply

There are lots of despicable people in Washington
engaged in a lot of unsavory behavior, so it would be very difficult to
get agreement if you asked regular people to select the most odious
feature of the political class.

Many people would probably choose corruption
as the defining characteristic of Washington, and it would be hard to
argue with that choice, but I think hypocrisy is an even better choice.

There's something fundamentally wrong when people push for policies
while making sure they don't have to abide by the results. Yet it
happens all the time in government.

But it's not just politicians who are being hypocritical. The
bureaucrats at the IRS also don't want to live under Obamacare even
though they're the ones who will be forcing us to live under that
misguided law!

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union
wants no part of the law. National Treasury Employees Union officials
are urging members to write their congressional representatives in
opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama's health care
law. ÉLike most other federal workers, IRS employees currently get their
health insurance through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program,
which also covers members of Congress. House Ways and Means Committee
Chairman Dave Camp offered the bill in response to reports of
congressional negotiations that would exempt lawmakers and their staff
from Obamacare. ÉCamp spokeswoman Allie Walker said. Òf the Obamacare
exchanges are good enough for the hardworking Americans and small
businesses the law claims to help, then they should be good enough for
the president, vice president, Congress and federal employees,Ó she also
said.

To augment the remarks of Rep. Camp's spokeswoman, it also would be
good to somehow figure out a way to make the lobbyists and other
Washington insiders participate in the Obamacare exchanges.

There aren't many Òsure thingsÓ in life, but one of them is that
Obamacare would be repealed almost instantaneously if the bigwigs in
Washington actually had to live under the law designed for peasants like
you and me.

Unfortunately, that's why Congressman Camp's legislation will never get approved.

FROM JOSEPH FARAH'S G2 BULLETIN

Now Lloyd's of London warns of EMP

Industry giant says 'extended outage' could be measured in years

WASHINGTON – Lloyd’s of London, the world’s specialist insurance
company providing services to companies in more than 200 countries, has
issued a dire warning of the potential consequences of an
electromagnetic pulse event from a solar storm, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Lloyd’s study, titled “Solar Storm Risk to the North American
Electric Grid,” centered on the highly populated region from New York
City to Washington, D.C., but added that other high-risk regions are in
the Midwest and in regions along the Gulf Coast.

The fact a major insurance company is looking at the economic
consequences of an EMP from a direct solar storm suggests there is
increasing concern in the insurance industry that companies may be
facing the danger of severe economic losses.

As a major trend setter in the insurance world, Lloyd’s unusual
warning about the effects from an EMP could have an impact on insurance
company coverage.

“A severe space weather event that causes major disruption to the
electric network in the U.S. could have major implications for the
insurance industry,” the Lloyd’s study said. “If businesses, public
services and households are without power for sustained periods of time,
insurers may be exposed to business interruption and other claims.”

Sources suggest insurance companies could begin requiring companies
they insure make sufficient efforts to harden their electronics to
protect their companies, especially since companies now can collect
insurance for work stoppage due to electrical outages.

“A severe space weather event that causes major disruption to the
electricity network in North America could have major implications for
the insurance industry,” the study said. “The total U.S. population at
risk of an extended outage from a Carrington-level storm ranges between
20-40 million with durations up to 1-2 years.”

Some experts suggest an EMP with this catastrophic effect on major
U.S. urban centers could, in effect, wipe out city populations because
of their dependency on those critical infrastructures that rely on
electricity, electronics and automated control systems to exist.

Sources say that it is curious that a British insurance company would
center on the effects of an EMP on U.S. cities rather than in Britain,
which has decided to undertake efforts to harden its national electrical
grid system. They add, if the United States doesn’t take action, the
effects will have profound effects on the world economy.

Saying that the corridor between Washington, D.C., and New York City
is at serious risk, the impact on a society that is increasingly
dependent on electricity is “likely to be severe and wide-ranging,” the
report said.

The 1859 Carrington event is regarded as the most severe solar storm
recorded in U.S. history. It occurred 154 years ago. The Lloyd’s study
warned, however, that such “very extreme storms” occur every 150 years.

As Expected, Obama Has It All Wrong

Barack Obama, the undocumented usurper currently defiling
the people’s House, spoke for 67 minutes last Wednesday outlining his
latest pivot — the 19th by some counts — to jobs and the
economy. He indicated with his policy pronouncements that he intends to
perpetuate the current misery through the end of his term, and further
destroy the middle class.

Since February 2009, 9.5 million people have dropped out of the workforce. As CNSNews.com reports, that means that 1.3 Americans have dropped out of the workforce for every job the regime claims it has created.

“We’ve created over 7.2 million private sector jobs,” Presidential
spokespuppet Jay Carney claimed at a recent press briefing. The regime’s
propagandists in the mainstream media didn’t correct Carney on one
important point. Government does not create jobs without killing a job
or jobs somewhere else.

Government creates nothing but misery and heartache. For to “create” a
job, government has to steal money from someone in the private sector —
either through inflation (money printing) or taxation — and give it to
someone else.

Irrationally exuberant government “stimulus” spending began under
George W. Bush’s regime as he sought to “save the free market system” by
“abandon[ing] free market principles.” But almost five years and
trillions of dollars later, here’s what we have:

Almost 90 million Americans not working.

15 million more Americans on food stamps today than in January 2009.
That’s two Americans on food stamps for every job “created” by the
regime.

Almost 11 million Americans receiving disability payments — 1.6 million more than in February 2009.
American has fallen to No. 27 in middle-class wealth.

Thanks to the threat of Obamacare, most new jobs being “created” are part-time jobs. American is becoming a part-time society.

In his speech, Obama decried the growing inequality between the haves and have-nots.

“This growing inequality, it’s not just morally wrong, it’s bad
economics,” he said. “Because when middle-class families have less to
spend, guess what? Businesses have fewer consumers. When wealth
concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that
threaten the economy. When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow
farther and farther apart, it undermines the very essence of America,
that idea that if you work hard, you can make it here.”

This statement demonstrates either Obama is profoundly ignorant of
economic theory or he’s deliberately misrepresenting the business cycle
to Americans. But none of his policy proposals — he promised to invest
billions of dollars to build new infrastructure, improve education,
create jobs programs and increase the minimum wage — have historically
done anything to improve the economy. In fact, they have been shown to
have deleterious effects. And all require a redistribution of wealth to
accomplish.

Americans are already overtaxed. There is no more blood to be
squeezed form the turnip. That’s not to say that Obama won’t propose
more taxes to “pay” for his new policies.

The government/banker system is wide open, devaluing the dollar with
the unlimited printing of money. This is economic war, pure and simple;
and Americans don’t seem to care one way or the other.

When the money printers print bales of paper money, the dollars
already in circulation become worthless. Anybody should understand this
debauching of the currency translates to widespread impoverishment.
Those who have now will soon be have-nots. No politician or government
bureaucrat will reveal this to the American people.

Money printing is a gangrenous rot on society that steals wealth
slowly but surely, as gangrene steals life from the patient. But the
Federal Reserve is locked into a policy of quantitative easing to
infinity.

Any hint that the Fed is going to back off the money printing
sends the market into convulsions.
But quantitative easing is as much responsible for the current economic malaise as the stimulus spending.

In his book When the Money Runs Out, Stephen D. King, chief economist of HSBC Holdings, writes:

The benefits of QE have a nasty habit of being channeled
to precisely those parts of the economy that are unlikely to respond in a
positive way. If, for example, lowering bond yields leads to a rally in
stock prices, it will be easier for big, blue-chip companies to raise
funds.

Small and medium-sized companies that have little or no access to
capital markets and, instead, remain dependent on bank lending, have
however derived little or no benefit.

The elected class loves the illusion of wealth created by money
printing. A propped-up market is often cited as evidence of a growing
economy. But it is merely an illusion, a bubble ripe for bursting.

The elected class loves the illusion of action created by wealth
redistribution and “investment” in their pet industries and crony
projects.

But neither of these “policies” benefits the middle class. They
continue to get squeezed in the vise of taxation and inflation, their
wealth pilfered from them day by day.

Senate leaders have collaborated to secure a supposedly
airtight 50-year guarantee of secrecy from the Finance Committee not to
publicly disclose tax reform proposals from all 100 Senators, nor reveal
the lobbying pressures influencing many of their suggestions, ahead of
major tax reform legislation to be written this fall.

The agreement, forged by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus
(D-Mont.) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), “assured lawmakers that any
submission they receive will be kept under lock and key by the
committee and the National Archives until the end of 2064,” according to
The Hill.

In other words, the American public can find out all the ways the
government defrauded them to protect politically active corporations
after everyone in the Senate is dead.

Baucus and Hatch will co-sponsor tax reform later this year.
Ostensibly, their vow of secrecy is intended to ensure all members of
the Senate feel equally free to involve themselves in what could be a
ground-up rewrite of the tax code. If it has the side effect of
concealing the Senators’ true motives for positing changes in the way
the Nation’s wealth is being redistributed, well, that’s unintentional.
From The Hill:

The lengths Baucus and Hatch have gone to reassure their
colleagues underscores the importance the tax writers are placing on the
blank-slate plan, and it shows they are working hard to ensure that all
100 senators engage in the process.
Baucus told The Hill he fully expects more senators to participate in writing because of the secrecy guarantee.

…It also illustrates the enormous pressure being brought to bear by K
Street lobbyists, who are working furiously to protect their clients
and the tax provisions that benefit them.

Only 10 staffers will be authorized to review Senators’ suggestions,
each of which is to be assigned a unique ID number and stored on
password-protected computers servers on both the Democrat and Republican
sides. Hard copies are to be kept in locked safes.

That’s a lot of skullduggery just to make sure Americans have a tough
time figuring out the obscure connections that link Senators in
landlocked rural States with lobby-backed proposals — to envision just
one relatively benign example — to offer major breaks to coastal
industries far from their constituent base. With one less way of
monitoring backroom agreements between government and private influence,
expect the Nation’s tax code to fester into an even uglier, more
confusing, more inequitable mess. Outrageously, the Senate is doing its
best to make sure there won’t be anywhere to lay the blame.

Op-ed: Time to get back to the all but forgotten economy By: Diane Sori

By early November, Congress must raise the debt ceiling or risk default
on the government’s debt. And with the debt limit having been hit in
May default is right around the corner.

So instead of staying in town and working on a solution to this, what
does Congress plan on doing…leaving town on August 2nd for a five-week
recess…like they need a recess from either doing NOTHING or screwing up
what little they actually do.

And add in Jack Lew, Obama’s shill of a Treasury Secretary, who warned
Congress against fabricating yet another crisis over federal
spending. Fabricating a debt crisis…guess in Obama’s and Lew’s eyes that
goes hand-in-hand with all the Republican’s supposed ‘phony scandals' fabricated to discredit this president.

“We need to get the debt limit extended in a way that doesn’t create a
crisis” Lew said. A Treasury Secretary who does NOT have a clue…don’t
raise the debt ceiling…CUT your freakin’ spending and cut it starting
now!

“We have already done a lot of deficit reduction,” he said in an
interview on NBC…the National Barack Channel. Yeah right...who does he
think he’s kidding…the only cuts Obama’s done are cuts to our Defense
Budget…cuts to increases in troops pay…and cuts to veterans benefits.

And all Obama does instead of talking about possible solutions is to rehash
his campaign teleprompted speeches as he keeps harping on economic
inequality…deliberately forgetting that most of the current economic
inequality is because of his own failed economic policies that don’t
even help the lower class let alone the middle class.

And of course Lew placed the blame on the 'supposed' fact that Obama had to
fight with Republicans over sequestration, spending, and budget cuts,
which he claims caused wild stock market swings costing the US its
top-tier AAA credit rating.

Nope, that loss of our triple A rating falls squarely on the shoulders
of Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his policy of spending more than is taken
in…basic failure in learning Economics 101.

So of course Obama is blaming everybody but himself…and still blaming Bush…the hallmark of his administration.

And Lew, Obama’s budget director in 2011, is part of the reason we’re in
the sad shape we’re in now for all he does is to continue to
reiterate Obama’s position that he will NOT
consider short-term spending cuts nor will he consider offsetting the defense
spending cuts with reductions in other government programs. Remember,
Obama has said time and again that he will NOT sign off on any budget
that includes cuts to entitlement program.

NO of course NOT…can’t cut the freebies and handouts that assure the
Democrats of the votes of those dependent on the government for their
survival...that can NEVER be.

And adding to this economic mess of Obama’s doing is that by October 1st
Congress must agree on a stop-gap measure to keep the government funded
or face a shutdown.

I say shut it down…shut the entire bloody screw-up of an Obama
government down…can’t be any worse than the semi-operational one we have
now.

And what say Obama to all this…his solution is to replace existing
programs with alternative entitlement programs and tax reforms. Yeah,
that’ll work real well won’t it…said with much sarcasm…as this simply
means tax the rich even more…the rich who create the jobs…and give more
free stuff to ‘the sponges’ of society. You know ’the sponges’ who
contribute NOTHING yet want everything but do NOT want to work for it
but will vote for who whomever gives it to them…those ‘sponges’.

Oh what a vicious cycle this man has created and it’s ‘We the People’
that are caught in the fallout, especially when it comes to jobs, as the
gap widens between rich and poor thanks to the rich being taxed to the
limits so that they actually cannot create much needed new jobs.

And the unemployment rate has NOT budged as the June numbers remain
unchanged at 7.6% with the number of unemployed persons officially
remaining at 11.8 million, and the number of long-term unemployed
remains at 4.3 million, or 36.7% of the unemployed. These numbers that are NOT
good at all because it means that one in three unemployed people have
been out of work for at least 27 weeks. And any new jobs that were created were
more likely to be part-time jobs than full-time employment.

Also, remember that even though the employer mandate been delayed by a
year, the infamous ObamaCare has forced employers to keep those workers
part-time to avoid employers from having to provide health insurance to
all employees who work more than 30 hours per week.

So the bottom line is that while Obama bloviates that we must NOT keep
focused on ‘phony scandals' and that we must refocus on the
economy, the fact remembers that the economy under Barack HUSSEIN
Obama’s misguided economic policies still stinks and will continue to do
so until he is out of office…which hopefully will be soon…as in can you
say Benghazi…which is anything but a ‘phony scandal’.